The Forever Watch (28 page)

“Somewhere along the way, your programs become more than a collection of machine learning algorithms. They are on the way to becoming AI.”

What? No—that can't be right. Its self-modification functionality is limited; the network of the population might have grown, but the individual particles of the swarm can't have changed that much while still running all the little modules we attached to it.

Only … I had already started to suspect that alien data was contaminating Monster. Could it have gone so far already? Rather than merely introducing bugs and crashing functions, could the interaction between my code and that of the Builders become something like this? It's a blur of equations and structure and ideas in my head, and then I push it back under waves of emotion. She must not know what I think of Monster. It could be so much more dangerous than she already fears.

“I am not a technical analyst, so I will not bother to regurgitate what the technicians tell me. I am a troubleshooter. I solve problems of the human sort.”

She is a hunter of men.

She interrupts my pacing by simply appearing in my path. I did not hear or see her move. There is no time even to feel alarmed. Her fingers rest against my temples, chrome to chrome, emitter to emitter. She
writes
something into my mind. An immense, strange mass of stuff. All the information she believes I will require. Images. Documents. Training memories. Textbooks.

The pain is not physical. It is a revolt of my neurons against rapidly assimilating so much data. My throat hurts. I feel my diaphragm squeezing. I cough, maybe choking on my spit, and I am crying out, on and off. Sensation comes and goes—my body detaches from me and comes back. It is as if my brain does not belong with this body anymore.

“Think on it, Miss Dempsey. We return in the morning. My name is Karla. I think we will enjoy working with each other.”

The chair and the table recede into the floor. They leave me lying on the floor, twitching, drooling, overloaded, and the doorway disappears when they exit.

One unifying ghost of an idea, laden with intense emotion, is spread throughout the data dump—her absolute and unyielding conviction that what lies beneath is simply too terrible to know.

 

 

Putting my head back together takes hours. Whatever she did was not an Adjustment. Skills are buried in here, in my thoughts. Learned reflexes overwriting my own, but nothing touching the self that remains me. At least, I think I am still me.

Even my internal chronometer was screwed up by whatever she did. Much of the normal programming running the neural Implant has been altered in a thousand different locations scattered across the modules.

Finally, my wiring is straight again, and my body is my own.

I feel a want, I have a plan. Are these my own ideas in my head, precipitated by the skills and information she gave me, or am I another kind of puppet? I can choose to stay here and assert my will and end up a vegetable tomorrow, or I can dance to the tune of the Ministry of Information and stay myself for a little longer. Every single day I was here, every hour, I spent meditating, refining my telekinesis, modifying my Implant programming. Did I do all those things, or was it Karla influencing me all this time?

Barrens would tell me it does not matter. Surviving matters.

Oh, I do want to see him again. I want to ask him, “Why?”

The thrust of my hand opens the tap. A crackle of
touch
, just a little power, but a lot of control, is all it takes to break up the fat stream of water into microdroplets, mist. Fog fills the room. Fog that glows eerie blue, masking myself from any psychic observation. It is weightless and takes hardly any effort at all. What consumes every iota of focus I have are the tiny blades of water spinning, whirring faster and faster, grinding at the inside of the faucet spout. The exterior is hardened and impervious, but the inner surface is not as tough, and mostly processed just for corrosion resistance.

A thread has started almost without my conscious direction. A subprogram running off my chronometer, counting down how many minutes I have before the warden decides that this seeming privacy is dangerous.

I get out a few grams of plastech powder from the eroded faucet spout, released from the control of the prison system. I fuse the wet, gray dust into dense slivers to continue the process, and it becomes easier and easier. I do not have the raw psychic ability of Karla, I cannot simply override the warden's control over the substance of my prison, but it is not physically indestructible.

The subtle whirring sound becomes an earsplitting shriek. My improvised drill has reached the hardened shell. Because it has been hardened so, it has some properties in common with ceramic. Too hard to scrape, too hard to cut—it is brittle.

Now, my task becomes difficult again. Deep breaths. My heart pounds. My head hurts more, more, more. Everything I have pouring into the growing, shaped slug of plastech in the faucet. Plastech can be expanded by a steady trickle of psionic energy at a specific frequency. It only takes a little time.

Finally, it shatters. Freeing up a dense third of a kilo of material to work with. Material that is already extremely hardened.

I shape it into a series of spikes. They are sharp. They are also harder than the substance composing the floor. I drive them into a circle around me, one at a time, with all the force I can muster. Force is interesting. I can only generate so many newtons of force without an amplifier. But because the mass of each spike is small, and force is the product of mass and acceleration, each narrow projectile thrusts down as if shot from a cannon in the movies. They pierce deep.

Now, I repeat what I did to the plug in the faucet. The spikes become seeds as I feed them power. They grow, becoming less dense, expanding. Roots, spreading.

There is no dramatic explosion of sound. Only the spreading of cracks under my feet.

The wall is starting to open.

I fall down my little rabbit hole, into a service cafeteria below. I am dizzy. I hit hard, absorb the shock of a ten-foot drop. Wet warmth at my nose. My ears. Pushing my gifts this far without an amp is a terrible strain. I am bleeding from my nose, my ears. My eyes are probably red, blood vessels popped.

Around me, Information Security men and women gawk at my nudity. These are not Enforcers or trained field agents—ISec is composed of hundreds of ordinary crew, secretaries, office workers, accountants, programmers, researchers. They get in the way of the ones that are trained, who are shouting at everyone to get down.

Outside of the prison, the plastech that composes everything around me is not under the control of a jail-keeping routine rendering it resistant to psychokinetic manipulation.

A series of trays fly to me, and I unravel them into thin sheets and fuse them into a bodysuit around my flesh, and boots to cover my feet.

Now, I run. I shove my way through the breakfast crowd, toward the kitchens, and the maintenance tunnels. I spot an amplifier around the wrist of a sleek-looking public-relations officer in a slinky dress, her brown eyes comically wide, her mouth clamping down on her sandwich. I tear the amp off her before she has time to think, then I am five feet away and getting farther before it occurs to her to yell, a mouthful of partially chewed mash hitting the floor behind me.

An ISec paper-pusher wants to try to be a hero and jumps at me, trying to tackle me. He's been watching too many old movies. He should have used his amp bracelet to subdue me. I send him flying away from me, a bowling ball knocking the pins of the crowd aside for me to rush through.

Now, some of them start to use their psi, and a hail of spoons and forks shoots after me, so many bullets. Poorly aimed bullets. They do more harm to each other than to me. I float more food trays along my way to block them.

This part is just like my paintball matches with my friends.

There are no Enforcers after me. They will all be held back just long enough for me to escape from the less competent, less trained interrogation staff. Or at least, I pray that Karla is doing so. Or I will be dust and ashes within moments.

The gray men in their murky, colorless coats drop through the hole I made. More are pushing their way in from the cafeteria entrance.

I am already past the kitchen doors. I fuse them shut. The sensation of being able to draw on the grid again is heady. I had been scraping by on a trickle in the desert, and now I have a sea of power behind me. The kitchen staff stare, stunned at this disruption of routine.

A flare of cobalt blue and the drainage grate pops free from the corner of the room. I force it wider.

The doors crush open. Angry men running, even as I jump down again. But I have to slow them down or the first
bruiser
that gets mobilized will knock me out before I can think to react.

I run and run. The breath whistles in and out between my teeth. I might have exercised as much as I could in my cell, but running a marathon is not the kind of fitness I could shoot for.

Foul smells in the air. Sewage sloshing around my feet.

Methane gas.

I part with a few grams of material from my sleeve, harden it into a pair of rough, metallic disks, leave them hovering behind me as I pound my way down the tunnel.

When I judge that my pursuers have reached my little present, I force the disks to strike together.

The spark gives birth to a fireball. I fling up a wall of dirty water and sludge to stop it from reaching me. The heat bakes it into a crust.

I hope I have not killed anyone.

Now, I have to get lost. I need to keep going deeper, to where there is too much interference for them to track and pinpoint my location through my Implant emissions.

Exhaustion. Not enough food. And the strain of pushing my talents beyond the limits I thought I had. Knees are trembling. Feet drag through the muck. The information that Karla has forced upon me includes many maps of these service tunnels. Functions she has added to my Implant make it a trivial matter to trace my path so far and match it up to the complex, three-dimensional web of shafts and tunnels.

So tired and it is still so far. I descend deeper into the network. Small plaques with hexadecimal markings label some of the intersections and keep me oriented. Karla did not explicitly mark out an escape route for me, but with my many requirements of staying away from where I can be detected and tracked as well as reaching one of the Nth Web data conduits spread throughout the ship, I have only a handful of options to choose from. Most of them are flagged, indicating that maintenance teams are scheduled to check on them soon.

The sludge underfoot begins to move faster, threatens to drag me under. I am close, at last, to a side-access link to the information network lines. There is no wireless to the Nth Web in the uninhabited zones. I need that hardwired line, need to signal Monster so Barrens can find me.

If she was telling the truth about the Monster being untraceable, then I don't need to worry; I can just use it to call out to him without the complex tricks he was using to message whomever else he's dragged into this.

I just hope he'll be able to find me, or I could be lost down here until I starve.

There. A circular door atop a landing high enough to be just clear of the slime.

Not locked, but too heavy for my feeble human muscles to open. Groaning now, I call upon the borrowed amplifier's power again. First, I reform my bodysuit and stretch the already thin material to its limits while treating it with subtle vibrations to increase its toughness and change its opacity. It covers me now, head to toe. A clear bubble forms around my head, encloses me with a minute's worth of breathable air. I need it to get past what lies ahead.

Too much strain in too short a time. The world seems to spin around me and I hang on to consciousness. The half-ton hatch swings out into a blindingly bright space full of lights.

The constricted, choking space of the sewage shaft opens up into a vast emptiness. The fetid air blasts out at my back. Fingers and power clutch at the walls and keep me from falling.

This is one of several main arteries cutting through the superstructure of the ship. It is unintentionally beautiful. Streams of light so intense they look like solid matter crisscross through the air, blues, yellows, greens, reds—the psionic power grid. The largest rivers spiral around the center and stretch up and down; it is all colors and none. They feed in and branch away from it toward the curving walls. Bolts of lightning crackle, traversing up and down, bouncing from the control antennae projecting out into the space, gleaming bridges of delicate filigree, ever-shifting, formless plastech tendrils that twine about the crackling pathways of energy rooted in the obsidian surface of the walls. Immense blocks of circuitry are embedded right into the structure of this grand hall of light. Strange symbols are carved everywhere—a character set I've seen before, in that one lost fragment of reclaimed data.

No time to take it in and wonder why there's this strange, ancient artwork here where there is no one to see it. Maybe they were markings by the Builders, useful during the construction of the Noah.

“Pay attention!” I bark at myself. It would be far, far too easy to die at this step.

Air sighs in and out along hundreds of vents. Not breathable air though—which is why I need my airtight shelter.

In the suit, my breaths are too loud in my ears. Must breathe slowly, must not saturate my air with CO
2
before I get to the data line on the opposite side of the shaft. It just takes courage.

I let go of the moldy, slippery doorway and take a step out into the emptiness. There is no drop. There is no simulated gravity as that would serve no purpose here. My stomach, though, insists that I am falling. My heart pounds. My inner ears tell me there is no “down” anymore.

Emergency zero-g training seems like a thousand years ago.

Biting my lip, I pull myself where I need to go, the faintest glimmer of my
touch
surrounding me. Slow. I must be careful. Touch one of those glowing currents and there will not even be ashes left of me. Banks of steam are crawling up and down the walls in rivers—vapor coolant, tremendously caustic. I must avoid those too.